Mastering the Art of Link Building (Part 1) Ep. 597

Howdy, welcome back to another fun-filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I'm your SEO consultant, Matt Bertram. For today, I have a great topic for you. It's a topic that I've started to cover in my masterminds. And if you have an interest in that, I will add the link in the show notes. So hopefully you'll get some value of this because I don't typically share this depth of stuff. So let's go ahead and jump into it. Well, I guess before we do that, let's read a quick review. This is from Thomas Turner with Baker Signs, one of our longtime clients. He has done an amazing job for us over the years. We have stood out in our industry with our continually evolving website and have seen incredible growth thanks to our search engine rankings and web presence. Thanks to EWR support and guidance, we have become a standout with our brand and experienced success beyond our original markets. With this team, you can rest easy knowing that you are staying competitive in a rapidly changing world. Thanks so much, Patif, to Tom, Thomas over there at Baker Signs. Yeah, so we've been doing website development and SEO for a long time. We started off as a web design company, quickly moved into SEO because people want to rank at Google and generate leads. Very, very powerful. There's different parts of SEO for you new listeners. We have a lot of new listeners. We're expanding into new markets. There's technical SEO, there's local SEO, there's on-page, and there's off-page. Today, we're going to be covering off-page SEO. Before I get into it, I really want to lay the foundation to let everyone know that off-page is like another layer on the cake. It's not the foundational strategy. Typically, when you look at a lot of services, I'm not going to say all services, but a lot of services that I see that are being advertised to me on social media for the very low SEO, low dollar value for SEO services, typically what they're

doing is they're running spammy links to your website. They're getting you an initial pop based on, what's it called, hive theory? No, it's like bees or birds, right, where they kind of buzz around and see what's going on. It creates a lot of activity. It's kind of how the new search engines work. I'm using the wrong terminology here, swarm, that's what it is, swarm theory. Essentially, you generate a lot of blinks, you generate a lot of signals, the swarm of spiders come and check out your site, and then they find out, well, there's not really a lot going on, and it leaves, and so you get a temporary bump, and then quite a large dip after that. And then if you're misleading the algorithms, they will penalize you for it. So it's kind of like a shot of, I don't know, energy, but it doesn't last, and it actually detrimentally hurts you in the long run, and the algorithm never forgets any links that are generated at your site. Sometimes you have to do disavow, so I'm not saying all, but a lot of these lower cost SEO services, where they don't even touch your website, and they're driving off page links to you, I would encourage you to stay away from if you're trying to build a long term brand. Now, if you're doing affiliate marketing, stuff like that, you have a burn site, hey, that is not what we're really covering here on this podcast. It's not for me, it's not for our clients, so that's not something we pursue. Off page SEO is really, you lay a good foundation on the site, you do all the different on page stuff, you set the foundational structure of the site, and then once you get to a level, you start adding, well, social media marketing is actually off page, local SEO is actually off page, PR is actually maybe considered off page, if you're looking at it from SEO standpoint. So anything that's off the site is off page. So I would start with

your social media profiles, and you can sync them together for content syndication. So if you have blogs, you can link them together, you can push information out, if there's certain platforms that you use more than others, you might want to customize the content for that, but getting the shares, getting the likes, does send signals. So I will tell you like for LinkedIn, for example, how the algorithm works is you don't want just somebody to like it, you want them to comment or even add an emoji that has a higher score than just a like or a different kind of comment, sorry, a different kind of like emoji in as far as like engagement, right? So you want them to put the emoji maybe, or a short message in the text below the image, sorry, I'm running a blank here, long messages are actually worth more. And then if you respond to it, and it creates that engagement and other people like it, then again, it sends more signals. But every social media share is actually a link and is sending a certain type of signal. The weighting of that does change. Same thing for, let's say, press releases, right? That's another off page strategy. It's not necessarily the press release you do. It's if other bloggers and other news outlets pick it up and share it, then that has the value but not from the press release angle. So kind of going back to the foundation, what I would tell you is you can rank sites all on page, okay? And we have a lot of sites and a lot of industries that we can rank on page and on page needs to be the fundamental of what you're working with. I'll tell you a quick story. A couple years ago, a client came to me, they were using, I don't know, some large agency, I forget the name of it out of Florida. And basically, they never had access to the site. So the SEO agency never had access to the site. They were

spending, I think, $5,000 to $10,000 a month. And typically, it was like off page link building, right? It was even worse than that. It was actually, the SEO agency had built a giant PBN, a private blog network of their own site. And so the client was giving them money to, well, grow their own site. And then they were putting really, really spammy links. They were manipulating the search engines and the anchor text and not stuff that I'm going to go into here. But they created tons, thousands, okay, of links from these sites. And then when the client left, every month, there were thousands of links that were dropping off in tranches. And I had to show the client what was going on and why the links were falling and why the traffic was falling. And essentially, the client has spent, I don't know, let's say $200,000, give or take, with this company and didn't retain any of the value when they leave. That's one of the problems or advantages about SEO, depending on what side of the fence you're on. If someone's doing on page on your site, and you leave, you get to take all that value with you, okay? If you're doing the work, you have to start over with a new client. And again, you got to get to the first page of Google, and the top of the first page of Google to see any kind of lead volume. And that takes, depends, maybe two to four months, you know, six months is kind of the rule of thumb on that. But typically, for the Google database turnover, it's about two months. So if you're already ranking, you can move it up if you're in topical authority, yada, yada, yada. But essentially, okay, so this client left, and it was dropping, dropping, dropping, dropping. You know, we got into the site, we've fixed a lot of well, there was just the site was not being maintained at all. And the link juice was just pushing so much link equity, that it

was it was shoving it up there temporarily. And they had to keep adding links to it, because it continued to drop. And so that just over time didn't work anymore. It was like continued injection of adrenaline, it just it just didn't work anymore. And so the client was looking for something else. And also, they're getting kind of spammy links, because all the signals were off, and it was just horrible. So, um, you know, that's an extreme of off page link building that you need to understand what the SEO is doing. They're basically your public representative for for what's going on. You know, so there's different, you know, I don't even know where that falls on the bell curve. But I would tell you, on the other side of the bell curve, right, so on one side, you got like low end, you know, spammy links, rule of thumb for SEOs, if, if the and this is for clients to if the deliverable that the client has, or sorry, the SEO has looks like non valuable to you, it probably is. Okay. And if you're providing like links, and they're not valuable, and you don't want to share them with the client, it's probably not something you should be spending your time doing. Okay. So, you know, a lot of what Google is doing, and what Matt cuts and the whole team, well, Matt cuts is no longer there. But like what the what their spam team, they're trying to reduce online spam. And a lot of if you generate a lot of spam links, or you're kind of in that neighborhood, you're going to get delisted for for that page. And for the word you're trying to rank for, especially if you even over optimize that page for outside the standard deviation, you're going to, you know, you're going to get penalized for it. Like Google's trying to reduce spam, they're trying to provide good results. So if you spend your time and energy doing high quality things, you won't have to be looking over

your shoulder. It's not a cat and mouse game. It, you know, every Google update, you'll do better and better and better. If you're focused on the end user, and in that experience, so, you know, off page, link building, especially these managed services, okay, so we'll talk about the other end of the spectrum. And then there's a lot of people out there that that that here that are listening, I that are paying thousands of dollars for a turnkey managed service link building. Okay. And if you're one of those people, I would encourage you to reach out to me and and we can set up a free consultation. I also have some, some pay consultation options as well. But here's what I'll tell you. If you don't know what they're doing, and they're your representative, I would be careful. Even though you're paying more, it doesn't mean they're doing a good job there. You know, if they're not actively engaged with you, if you're not understanding what you're getting, if you're not evaluating these links, they're going to get you, you know, not high quality links, not cheap links, maybe better quality than kind of spammy spammy links and and a lot of like directories and stuff like that. But but, you know, I guess posting all this kind of stuff, most of it's junk. And I would tell you, a lot of these like new sites, okay, if you think about it, or these multi content sites, these these multi content sites that hold on one second. All right, sorry, someone someone had walked in on me. So what was I saying? So a lot of these sites that that are just multi information, you got like, let's say you're in a home services space, let's say, and there's, you know, roofs and homes and outdoors, and then they have like finance, and then they have tech, and then they have, like whatever, whatever, whatever. You can be a topical authority in all those areas, if you silo everything correctly, and you can build an extremely

large site. However, most of these sites are just made to sell links. And they are just, you know, AI generated, rewriting content, most of the content I publish gets rewritten pretty quickly. And, you know, just, it's just a content factory, they're just generating stuff that's low quality, to drive links in there, there's not even a real structure to how they're linking everything together, a link is a citation, a link is referencing something, okay. And so I would tell you that it's just a bunch of random links going to a bunch of random places. And when you look at how you should be building links, think about it like nodes, okay, in kind of a data set or no, like topics or waypoints inside a bigger kind of world or sphere, right. And so if you have a site that's just randomly spouting links to different places, and there's a tool, forget the tool, it can show you, it can actually detect. And so this is a third party tool. So do you think that Google doesn't have anything better than this? But essentially, this tool will tell you if you're getting a link, like on the other side of the universe of links, right, or the universe of sites that has no association with you at all, it's like on the other side of the universe. So, you know, I don't know what the best analogy is. But if you're operating over in this sphere, and you're a topical authority in this geographic area, and you're interacting with people, and you're going to events, and you're kind of bumping to people, you know, you want the links to kind of eventually based on the surfer mentality, them coming back to you, right at some point, like they hit this website, they hit this website, this is what it's like, and it comes back to you. If someone on the far side of the universe, okay, you know, links to you, it's like, what is that? That's like, so random, right? And it can be easily

picked up. And so understanding, if these sites are in your kind of vertical, are certainly more important than random sites. News sites, like a big news site does carry a lot of weight. However, if there's just one random news site, right, on the other side of the country that talks about you, that looks odd, too. It would typically be a lot of different news sites, right? And then there is kind of like doing press releases, press release strategy and things that are looking organic. Because you're, you're in the news, and a lot of people are talking about you. And there's a lot of things happening, that's, that's really, really positive. But if you have like one new site randomly talking about you, not so good, you want like a local news site, or if you're a national brand, there might be something in the community that you're doing. But there should be some other indication of what's happening than just some like random link. So think about this, you've got this link service, and there's a bunch of lawyers and other industries where they're just paying for managed links, right? And typically, it takes about eight months, I don't know, it could take less than that, depending on on who's selecting the links to actually generate any kind of value. You know why? Because you're just like, imagine this universe again, you're getting random links from all over the place. And, and depending on how many links you're buying until those links, there's some kind of connection there. It's like the circuit doesn't connect, okay. And so you're not getting any real value for like, Google decides if if this link is going to push link equity or not the same thing with like, no follow links. If you know, like, it will decide if it matters or not, right. And they're looking at all these different kinds of associations. And so all I guess, the bottom line here, and I'll go into kind of the, the theory, or my theory on how this is

working, and, and let me just say, you know, the strategies that we employ, I can see in the data, I need to do a better job of pushing out some case studies. But, you know, we get you in the top 100, right. And so you're in the game. And if you're in the top 100, or at least pushing some kind of link equity, a lot of times, Google doesn't even index a lot of this stuff. And again, these bigger sites, you do get indexed in there, there's a certain amount of link equity that happens from that. But also, I will go into some of the details. But the link equity is distributed. Well, some people say evenly and I've seen in the data, you know, actually, there's two links on the page based on where they're placed, push a little bit more link equity. And sometimes Google even decides what pushes links and also image, the first image on the page sometimes pushes link equity. But again, Google determines this based on in reference to everything else, right. So if you're randomly generating signals, until there's some kind of association, it's like the circuit doesn't get completed, it doesn't get connected. And so it could take a long time for that, that SEO strategy work and a lot of money. And there's a lot of links that are being generated that are not valuable to you. So I do want to try to cover in this podcast, at least at a high level, what to look for, when you're paying for a linking service, and they're just sending you a bunch of random links. And you're just like, okay, that looks good. Right? And if it's not necessarily the case, there's a lot of great third party tools that help you see different things based upon this website, and this links, these links, as well as strategies to even, quote, unquote, power up these links. That means there's different tiers, okay, of links on links on links, right? Links to links to links, so building,

maybe it's called link sculpting, or a linking strategy. Here's what I can tell you, okay? Most people, and, and, and there are some enterprise level brands that link building works great for, for the majority, if not all small businesses, you do not need off page link building. Okay? I'll say that again. For most small businesses, you do not need off page link building, even in a competitive industry, I have some national brands that on page, and then, you know, we can leverage some web 2.0 is that we control, but I can generate and create the signals that I need to create totally white hat, without the need of additional sources of link equity, essentially, if you optimize and you flatten that kind of yield curve, or I don't know if that's the right terminology. But, but if you, if you narrow the focus of where those that link equity is being pointed, and you understand how to do forward linking, you know, interlinking, back linking, whatever you want to call it, you can focus and point the link equity of where you want it. Okay? And so typically, a standard site will have enough link equity to get to the first page and rank, you know, there, there might need to be some content creation and, and blogs and pages, depending on the size of the site, the length of the site spin around, etc, etc. But also leveraging your own social media profiles, like if you create a number of social media profiles, those are that kind of first outer tier, and then you have citations, right, which you know, for for Google, my business for a GPS coordinate, having citations really important, how you do citations, they are valuable. Now, there are studies out there by white spark and a couple others, that only about 60% of those citations, maybe I have that number off a little bit, even get indexed, right? Because while you're duplicating the same description, same title, all that sort of thing, well, Google looks at them, is that

valuable or not, right? So some of these citation sites are not that valuable, their strategies to, to make sure that they get indexed, they don't get indexed, they don't, again, push any link juice, also, email campaigns and newsletters, right, pushing out newsletters to former clients, leads, that sort of thing, getting them to click on a link, and going to your website, right, or to your blog, or something like that, can generate a lot of signals and value. And if people share that, again, if you're creating high quality content. So hopefully, you're following me. And I know I'm kind of jumping around a little bit and covering a lot of things. But link building is not something that that you necessarily need to pursue, if you're starting out, okay, and it's not something you need to worry about. You need to focus on on page, okay, and making sure that that site is foundationally set strong and sending the proper signals. And then when you need more link equity and more juice, you want to pull that from off page, I'm going to, I'm going to do another podcast, I'm going to talk about, well, all kinds of different creative linking strategies. But you're trying to put something out there, whether it be a blog or infographic or something like that, that other people want to link to, that's valuable that other people are potentially searching for. Also something that is not like vanilla, that that Google already has that they don't need like information that that's new, that they can index that's useful, that's going to be one of the top 100 answers to whatever it is that that you're looking for, right. And so there's a lot of creative linking strategies that you want to employ. And I've seen some really expensive linking strategies that people put out there. I think I remember this a couple years ago, I had a plastic surgeon I was working with had just paid $15,000 for EDU linking strategy that wasn't very hard to implement. But it does

take some thought and some effort. And really, if you think about it, it didn't generate a lot of long term value. Okay, you want to really think about your brand and how to grow your brand from a public relations standpoint. If you're a bigger company from an investor relations standpoint, and you want to increase your online visibility in a way that that is organic and useful in the way that well, a legitimate company would grow and reflect online. And so at as like, I have this graphic on I think on our website, there's a methodology page. And I have this old graphic of like the earth, okay, and there was like different layers of the earth. And it was like your website, high converting website, you know, CRO laying the foundational SEO. SEO should be like the atmosphere or kind of like the first layer of everything that you should do, which is really more on page and technical core web vitals has a lot to do with it. And then now, okay, now, now, you're talking about off page linking strategy, but I think interlinking actually fits into that first, you know, adding, let's say retargeting before running paid ads, a lot of people want to jump into paid ads, and they don't have a high converting landing page. They run it to like, just their basic website, or their homepage, which is not meant to convert, maybe it's an informational site, it's not a lead capture. So so there's a lot of I guess, foundational things you can do. But I would utilize the link equity that you have first, before going to tap new sources. And when you're tapping new sources, there's a better way to do it. Because I can also tell you some of these sites that are selling links, for example, if you buy a link from that, or you have a link from a site that buys links, okay, from a site that buys links, you get a link from somebody that's buying links, right. So one, one,

like kind of touch away, if you're associated with that neighborhood, that link might not even push any link equity. Okay. And a lot of these links, if you're buying and they're buying from big hubs, or whatever, Google can figure this out. And we'll just say, oh, that that site's not going to push any value. So the money that you're paying for, you know, might, you might not be even getting any value from that. And if you're buying a bundle of these links, well, there's probably one or two of them that are slipping through, but you're not the full amount of what you're spending, you're not receiving back. And and let me kind of transition into what you should look for in a link. And then I will come back and do another podcast about how to utilize some of these linking strategies. Again, you either have time, or you have money, you can hire somebody. If you have the money, but you don't have the time to do some of these things. And I know some of these things are nice, it's like, you know, turnkey, set and forget. But man, I've, I've tried a lot of these linking services. And and not only like, the common ones, I've used some very, very high profile linking services in the past, and I've been extremely disappointed. So the price doesn't necessarily mean they're good. It just means whoever you're buying that from has a good brand, potentially, and is making more margin. But but it doesn't necessarily mean what the work is good. And so I would encourage anyone to evaluate, understand what they're doing, and go, hey, I don't have time to do this. But I want you to do it. But I want to kind of know what you're doing. Or like you could hire someone like me, I actually have a number of clients that I help evaluate what's happening, like what's called fractional CMO services. So I help kind of oversee give a second opinion, manage other vendors. I actually have a

call later this week with a big content shop that was hired by one of our clients. And and I'm overseeing and managing that contractor plus a couple other contractors. And and then we're doing on page SEO for them. And then they had this team that we kind of got plugged into. And then I became like the digital strategist managing that. And so we added another service of CMO services on top of the on page. So my team's doing on page and then I'm coming in as fractional CMO and that works really, really well too. If you have existing relationships, we're not trying to, you know, overturn the apple cart. We just want you to get the most value again, one of our missions is to help 1 million businesses grow, which I think we've succeeded that, you know, but that's one of the ethos is when we did start EWR digital or results and we certainly continue to pursue that. So yeah, so we could we could help it in that way. But when you're looking at these links, OK, first thing you want to look at is you like. Is this a is this like look at the website, just look at the website, look at the kind of content. Is it in your niche? Is it niche specific? If it's not niche specific. You know, then then you've got to go to different tiers to evaluate. Maybe is it pushing juice or is it or is it there's two categories, I would say niche specific or really, really high quality news, OK? If it's like a new site you've never heard of and then they maybe use one of the words or a target keyword in the word, you've got to really evaluate the site of why it was created. So typically I'd go to the about us page and see if there's like a description or what the site's about. Typically if they're blank. So if you're getting a link and you're buying links, you get a list of links and you

go to the link and look at it, go to the about us page and if there's no really about us or there's some generic description and there's no address or contact information, be suspect. It's probably just there for for links for for to sell links to for, you know, quote unquote SEO value, right? And Google can can see that pretty easily, right? You can look at the the terms of service, the about us page, see if there's contact information. If there's not, you know, you can already put it into a category if you think about like from a machine learning standpoint. So so look at that and that suspect or if it passes muster, then then look at the type of content that's being produced and if there's a bunch of random stuff. So like if it's a finance site, for example, and they start talking about crypto or payday loans or or something like that, that that might be outside of the ordinary. Think about that or a remodeling site, right? A house remodeling site and then it starts talking about, you know, I mean auto is kind of a touching vertical of maybe home related durable or home services, but it's it's not really specific, right? You want a site about automotive, talking about automotive repair, talking about whatever, and then you want a site about like remodeling houses or things to do with houses, and it's OK if they talk about patios or pools or whatever, but a car is a different topical authority, right? Like, would you have your contractor if that is working on your house, work on your car like think about it like that? Or if you have like a. You know, a medical site that starts talking about the top financial planning things, whatever, right? You're like this is a medical site. It should have medical expertise. You know, you know, personal finances is outside that vertical. So so look at that. So these big sites that just have all kinds of different categories, how valuable is

that going to be? The analogy I use and I've used this in different cases is think about a you're going to a restaurant and there's that machine I actually know somebody that knows the guy that created Ram story, but you take the cup and you're like, I want Coke or Pepsi or Sprite or dark pepper, whatever you want to drink, lemonade, tea, whatever, and you push that button, right? Well, look at it like that site. You want that to be you want it all, whatever you want to drink, right? And you want that site to look that way, too. If it if it has a bunch of different random stuff, it's like, oh, I'm going to take a little bit of Sprite and I'm going to do some Dr. Pepper. I'm going to mix it in with some tea and lemonade, and you could make an interesting drink. I'm not saying you couldn't, but but I call it a suicide, right? Like or that's what we used to call it when we were younger. And I think there was actually a soft drink that that actually did that just took a bunch of extra flavors and it was like, OK, soda or something. I don't remember. But but not helpful to Google. OK, so so that's the second thing. All kinds of random categories. Also, then you can start using tools to to look at the on page structure. Do they know what they're doing? One of the best telltale indicators is to use something like S.M. Ross or H.R.S. I think you get a couple of free searches if if if if you're not paying for that service and and you can look at what is the anchor text, what are the keywords it's currently ranking for? Right. And typically that's kind of like a X-ray vision or laser focus, and you can even do it with boolean searches in Google. You can see what what are they ranking for? Right. And a lot of these sites, it's so weird. Like you can see

that the ranking for some kind of video game or some kind of like crypto thing or whatever. Right. Like you can see in like, are they talking about what it is like you want to be talking about? And like, are you in the same neighborhood with them from an expertise standpoint? And so so you can start looking at those tools. You can also start looking at their links, you know, go through it, just hover over the links and see if it's linking to stuff that is is similar to you or in the same category or stuff that you might link to. And if it's not, that's probably a toxic site and you probably want to stay away from it. I can tell you, we did have a client come to us. This was this probably a year ago, and they had paid for a lot of, well, off page managed service link building and they couldn't figure out why their site wouldn't rank. We went through an audit and essentially we said, OK, we got to we got to disavow a bunch of these links that are really in bad neighborhoods that it looks like you bought links from. And so we had to go through a disavow process of stuff that they had spent good money for. And then guess what? It started ranking. It got outside of that or back inside that standard deviation. So, you know, again, you've heard the analogy or whatever it is, you know, too much of a good thing is bad for you. That's absolutely true. If you're thinking about standard deviations, if you're thinking about how Google works, if you get outside of what other people would do on kind of this sliding scale, you get penalized the more you go outside of it. OK, like so they put kind of a dampening effect on it all the way through till you would maybe, you know, be qualifying for a manual penalty. Right. But it's going to be algorithmic penalty. And what you want to do when

that happens again, that's not the focus of the site is grow the site to have a ratio that that's inside the standard deviation or you need to unwind some of the work you did. You can definitely over optimize stuff. And what I can tell you is if you don't know what you're doing with link building or you're jumping in with link building before it makes sense, because there's a natural progression of the growth of a site. Right. And typically, if a site is getting links. Right. And it's not ranking for anything yet by itself. Why is it getting links like what's what would be the reason now they could be doing some other off off off Internet, off like off like offline, sorry, offline strategy that could be generating this. And then swarm theory will come in and try to figure that out. If there's like some PR, you're at a conference or something like that. But but if it can't match up the signals where it's organic, it's going to you're going to get a pop and then you're going to get a drop. And what you're really looking for is sustainable growth. Right. So. Wow, we've covered a lot here. You know, if you're listening to this on like 2x speed, I know I listen to my stuff at like one seventy five and then I slow it down to one fifty if it's too much information. You might want to listen to some of this again. I did drop a lot of nuggets in there, but I know I jumped around a little bit. You know, I was looking at the outline here, basics of link building, you know, link building services. You know, we talked about the sliding scale didn't really go into effective outreach strategies and how we pursue it and how we make it scalable. That's some of the stuff that we do in our training is we we train, train you in kind of blocks. So you learn this block and then you add this other block to

it and then you your strategies get more and more complex. But again, when you're at an off page link building, that's that's almost like the sugar or salt, OK, on top of the meal. It's not the whole meal. So I think a lot of these people that are paying a lot of money for link building services should probably really investigate if these links are valuable, maybe reevaluated or find somebody like me that can help you evaluate. Is that a good use of money because you're you're spending a lot of money on that? I would even say the same thing about content creation. After a certain level, there's a depreciating return on value for for blog creation, also content creation. I would tell you, too, there's tools that you can look at to see if you're even indexed for those blogs and if those blogs are generating links and if they're not, that's a big waste of money, too. I see a ton of clients doing that. I mean, they have tons of blogs. They keep generating more blogs. They're not valuable. Google's not indexing them. No one's linking to them. And so you're just spending a bunch of money. And so, again, I think it goes back to the strategy and reevaluating what you're doing. I think you could put that money to better uses, maybe setting up a newsletter, reaching out to existing customers, keeping that warm, pushing people to really high quality blogs that you generate, developing a solid three month PR strategy that will generate you link equity, true link equity and link value to what you're doing. And there's absolutely ways to do that that are not that difficult. It might take a little bit of coordination. A lot of these would be done turnkey. But initially at the beginning phases of the campaign, we have to get input from the client. OK. And so going on, content is key. Link worthy material. Right. We definitely talked about that. High quality infographics, videos, interactive content. That's super important. You know, they

say dwell time is not an issue, but all the other components that factor into what we call dwell time are all important. And Google's looking at all those individual factors in all their different algorithms, not just dwell time. But that's kind of a shortcut to look at if it's valuable. We talked a little bit about social media and all the social media signals. There are a lot of tools out there that now incorporate how many shares, how many likes does this content have? I would encourage you to build a syndication strategy with your content so you're repurposing existing content and you're not, you know, doing too much work. You can set up automations. You can use, you can delegate some of this stuff to maybe VAs or agencies to get this working so you focus on creating one piece of content and then push it out over multiple channels, which is, was quite effective because it's original content and you're, you're distributing it. And then there are some hurdles. We talked about some of the concerns, the penalties, you know, algorithmic changes. Hey, algorithm change typically takes like two weeks to implement another, let's say two months to fully see what happens when the database turns over. We didn't really go into key performance indicators. We did talk about, I guess, a little bit of the things to look for when you're looking at the individual links and how to evaluate those. But I would tell you most of these link building services, which I was considering offering a link building service, but you know, not again, it's the sugar on top, right? It's not like, it's not something that you need a whole ton of. And also that dial of off page links, which is certainly part of the algorithm has been turned down a lot and it certainly sends signals, but understanding how to link content together, which I just can't cover it in this podcast is absolutely critical. And that's a lot of the stuff that we train remembering that each link

is a citation. So I see so many links that people are creating and it's sending them like the most random signal. And if you don't know what you're doing, just send less signals, do less links. Make sure the links are like linking to something that makes sense, right? And just do less of them. So Google can understand what you're trying to say. They're trying to communicate with Google. And if you're sending a bunch of random links or you have a bunch of people working on a site that, that are not in concert to what they're doing, there's all these different kind of conversations and signals being sent and it's just, it's just not valuable. And then typically what you have to do is kind of wait, let the signals kind of die down and let, and then amplify the quality signals or let Google kind of sort it out because people come to the site, people interact with the site, Google can kind of figure it out over time. That's the same thing with like paid strategies, paid strategies, get that AI working for you. It takes a couple of months for it to really understand and then man, it starts to really hit solidly. So I haven't done a podcast about link building in a while. Hopefully got a ton of value out of this. I would ask, hey, we are expanding into Canada. We're working with a number of companies north of Houston. So if you, if you know anybody in Canada, please share this podcast with, if you've got value out of it, please comment or like on whatever platform you're listening to. Really would appreciate it. Hey, I will put links in the show notes. If you, you know, set up a free consultation with us. If you want to go really deep on your stuff, set up a paid consultation and get me directly. You know, we are starting a mastermind course. We are starting a small business training course. I know a lot of people have had interest in

that. We're a little quarter behind on that. We've been pretty busy with new business since the beginning of the year into last year. But we will be rolling that out. Thank you so much for your support. There are ways to support this podcast. Hopefully you get it, get value out of it. Really the initial reason we started this podcast was to disseminate information among our team. And this was, well, 13, I think 13 years ago before podcasting was what it is today. And so it is a very effective kind of training vehicle. And hopefully you are finding as such, if you're advancing SEO or you're trying to figure it out. And I would just tell you, SEO absolutely works. I mean, I can tell you today, and I know there's been a ton of changes over the last 36 months, but man, like we have it so locked in right now. So we'll get them in like top 100, okay. And boom, we'll get them in the game. And then within 30 days, typically, right in the 60 day window, we can pop you up to like first position, second position, third position, you know, it depends on all the foundational stuff that you're laying out. But man, you get that right on some of our long term clients. All that stuff is on point. We'll go into a new keyword set and just absolutely crush it. And then each quarter, we just keep adding and adding more traffic. So if that keyword or that page is producing, you know, one, two leads a week, or one or two leads a month, it just depends based on your niche and how long tail you want to go. And then you just keep adding to it, you start getting, we have clients that are getting literally 15 to 25 to we have one getting like 30 something, I don't know, it kind of varies, because they're top three for I think 160 keywords, right. And so we have some clients that are just generating so much

business. It's awesome. And so I don't know if you need any help, reach out to us if you want to grow your business online with the gosh, I need to write this down. But the most powerful tool on the planet, the internet, call us, get on our calendar for increased revenue in your business. There is a free consultation link up in the upper hand corner if you go to EWRdigital.com. Thank you so much for your support. Hopefully you found this valuable. I know I went a little long today. Thank you again. Until the next time. My name is Matt Bertram. Bye bye for now. Transcribed by https://otter.ai